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At the beginning of September 2013 our Revaluing Care network had its second workshop, following an earlier workshop at Keele University, UK, in September 2012. This second meeting over two days at the University of Adelaide, in South Australia was marked by its attention to analytical concerns that had been raised in the 2012 session. It was also marked by much convivial discussion over food and wine at the end of each day.

We met in a room with views of the city all around us and, fortunately, the sun shone almost all of the time. What I recall most clearly was the very high standard of the papers, the sense of an extraordinary level of conversation within a group which has now forged a strong identity. The degree of confluence of ideas, of substantive and strongly supportive debate was striking. It is rare to attend such an event and feel constantly engaged by an extremely stimulating exchange of views. The event was both inclusive and demanding in the very best sense.

The workshop looked at a wide variety of existing services around care and their impacts on social interconnection (such as services around HIV/AIDs, young people and dementia care), as well as a range of existing legal and policy frameworks. This international orientation informed extensive discussion around new ways of conceiving care (for instance, in relation to social activism, migration and cross-national mobilities). However, it also enabled us to consider where the term care begins to fall away, or seems insufficiently recognised or activated. Consequently there was a significant interchange over the two days concerning the analytical and practical boundaries of care (for example, in relation to sexualities, diverse families, the notion of the human, marginalised services and public institutions seemingly distant from care including parliaments and courts).

These deliberations led to a range of theoretical and terminological discussions around the continuing usefulness of the notion of care, around what it covers and its limits.

The success of the workshop was not only evident in the strengthening of the network as an active, participatory and supportive research community, but also obvious in the final discussions around building research teams, projects and publications across the world and across disciplinary constraints. We aim as a result to produce articles, books of collected works, and grant applications. Many of these aims are now in process. The group was also firmly of the view that further workshops would be very worthwhile and assist in the development of these aims. So, watch this space.

In sum, I can only say that I, for one, gained immensely from the workshop and now have an even stronger sense of the considerable research capabilities of the group. This is a group with much to gain from our continuing association! It is one of the few research clusters that I have been involved in which shows ongoing promise of generating important intellectual exchanges and innovative new work .

By Loretta Baldassar & Laura Merla

Every day during his lunch break at around 1pm, Alberto, who lives in Perth, Australia, phones his 85 year old father, Angelo, who lives in Rome, Italy. Angelo, who is not in the best of health, is usually sitting at the kitchen table having his morning coffee and bread roll. “It’ll only be 6am in Italy, but Dad will always be waiting for my call,” Alberto explains. Since Alberto’s mother’s sudden and unexpected death a year ago, Alberto, an only child, has tried to manage his father’s increasing care needs from a distance. He took 6 weeks unpaid leave from work to travel to Italy to arrange the funeral for his mother and put in place care supports for his father. Both Alberto and Angelo see aged care facilities as a last resort option; they are expensive and have a social stigma that reflects badly on families. Angelo wishes to remain living in his own home for as long as he can. Moving to Australia is not an option because of Angelo’s failing health; furthermore, aged migration to Australia is costly with prohibitive requirements. Given the aged care regimes in both countries, father and son adopted the commonest solution and hired a domestic worker, Maria, to work from 9 to 5 each day, preparing lunch and dinner, doing the cleaning and shopping and taking Alberto to his medical visits. Maria has agreed to move into the spare room as a live-in carer if Angelo’s health deteriorates. A long-time family friend, Nadia, the daughter of Angelo’s old friend and neighbour, Nello, sets up a Skype every Sunday when she visits her father (who lives next door). Alberto feels this is the best way to “get a thorough update”.

Every Saturday and Sunday, at around 6am, Maria phones her 10 year old son, Diego, in the Dominican Republic. She arrived in Rome a year ago on a tourist visa. Maria planned to find work as a domestic and raise enough money to bring Diego to Italy. In the meantime, Diego lives with his grandmother Lucia, Maria’s mother. Twelve people currently live in Lucia’s crowded house, including her frail partner Arturo, two of Maria’s brothers, their partners and children, and Maria’s sister Anna’s three children. Anna is a domestic employee in the US. Maria and Anna call Lucia a few times a week to talk with and discuss their children, exchange support with their mother, and talk to other family members present at the time of their call. The two sisters are also in regular contact with their oldest sister, Teresa, who lives in Belgium with her Spanish husband and their three children, and the three women send monthly remittances to their mother. In spite of the distance, Teresa plays a central role in her extended family, and is considered by all as the head of the household that is stretched across thousands of kilometres and several countries. Teresa checks with her brothers and sisters-in-law that Arturo, who suffers from diabetes and has lost his sight, takes his medicines and eats properly, and sends emergency remittances when a specific need arises. She visits her family every year, and during these visits she works with her brothers on the renovation of the family house.

These case studies highlight the way family members from different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds care for each other through a process of asymmetrical reciprocal exchange, across and despite the distance that separates them, and the way that care circulates between them. The idea that care circulates within transnational family networks is indeed central our edited book entitled ‘Transnational families, migration and the circulation of care : understanding mobility and absence in family life’ (Routledge).

With increased mobility and improvements in both travel and communication technologies, more and more people are experiencing transnational family lives. The chapters that make up this volume cover a rich array of case studies including analyses of the inequalities between transnational families who circulate care between developing nations in Africa, Latin America and Asia to wealthier nations in North America, Europe and Australia. There are also examples of intra- and extra- European, Australian and North American migration and care circulation, which involve the mobility of both the unskilled and working class as well as the skilled middle and aspirational classes.

Whether pushed or pulled out of homelands in search of safe asylum, better economic futures or improved lifestyles, increasing numbers of people are separated from their family by distance and national borders. Those family members who ‘stay behind’ or ‘stay put’ (as it were) in their place of birth or ancestral homeland, also become part of social relationships stretched across time and place, even though they might never actually relocate or even move at all. We believe a focus on the disparate trajectories of care circulation helps us to better understand mobility and absence in family life, so that we might theorise transnational families as contemporary family forms in their own right. This book highlights, in particular, how the sense of belonging in transnational families is sustained by the reciprocal, though uneven, exchange of caregiving, in the form of financial, emotional and practical support, ‘hands on’ care as well as accommodation. By doing so, this volume challenges narrow definitions of care to consider the portability of care, a fundamental topic for our contemporary lives.

Sources:

Baldassar L. & Merla L. (Eds) (2013) Transnational Families, Migration and the Circulation of Care: Understanding mobility and absence in family life. Routledge, Transnationalism Series

On 19th September 2013, at the Annual Lecture of the British Institute in Eastern Africa in Nairobi, Dr Ann Stewart delivered a lecture entitled ‘Caring about care: Recognising and regulating body work in a global market’. Based on her recently published book, Ann gave a compelling and wide ranging talk about forms of care and asked the question ‘who do we care about and how’? The discussions that followed the lecture were vibrant and engaged, the sorts of critical conversations about labour and about gender that I had hoped would come about in my time at the Institute.

On 21st September, at lunchtime, a terrorist siege began of an upmarket shopping mall in Nairobi, Westgate, a mile or two from the Institute. Everyone reading this will have seen the terrifying images. For well-off Kenyans who have become used to hearing the occasional distant grenade explode in the east of the city, in a crowded church or bar or bus station, the events mark a sea change. Here Kenya’s wealthy elite and the international community are the target and terror is at the heart of our lives. I’ve heard it said countless times this week that, looking at photographs of the attack taken in the mall, many of us recognised shop fronts, escalators, sweet stalls, even marble tiles on which we have trodden. As elsewhere, the mall is at once a response to, and a perpetuation of, a city segregated between the wealthy and the destitute. Reborn each day, sparkling clean, its shelves restocked with international branded goods, the Nairobi mall succeeds in making invisible the messy reality of life in a third world city. It would be deeply dishonest to deny that those who clean the mall, serve its meals, guard it – in short, those who provide us with our accustomed care and comfort – go unseen, unknown, unheeded.

Yet in the past three days we have heard stories of supermarket staff, faced with terrified customers running into the shop when the grenades and gunfire began, shepherding people into store rooms, barricading them in to conceal them from the attackers, hiding them behind boxes in stock rooms. Despite our own bleak assessment of ourselves as deeply divided along ethnic lines, as a society riven by long running racial divisions, in the terrifying and traumatic siege of Westgate mall many have commented on the intersecting unities we have discovered this week. An elderly Indian lady, recently returned home from England to care for her elderly mother in Nairobi, and desperate to do something to help, went down to the perimeters of the mall to serve tea and food to the police and media who have worked without a break for days. There she met an African woman who for many years has come to the mall everyday to sell tea and food to its cleaners, waitresses, guards. For the past three days, these two women have teamed up to cook and bring food to those working outside, plastic bags on the ground, car boot full of supplies wide open and elderly mother, still needing to be cared for, in the front seat watching them work.

But the events of the past three days have also made visible that which the well-off and the comfortable work so very hard not to see. The private security guard paid the minimum wage carried our children to safety through a pool of blood; the waitress whom we never greeted in three years of coffee drinking hid us in the cafe kitchen; the cleaner whom we never knew of ushered us to safety through a back exit.

This past three days, Ann’s question at the BIEA lecture – who do we care about – has been constantly in my mind. And as we slip back into our mutual distrust and distance, perhaps we might remember to ask, who cares about (and for) us?

While young men and possibly young women were laying siege to a shopping mall in Nairobi, killing young and old indiscriminately despite press reports to the contrary, I was spending the day with Maasai families experiencing care at first hand. While they were forcing their way into this space where love and care was being bought in the same way as elsewhere in the global market place, through children’s cooking parties, coffee and tea drinking and the body work of hairdressers and cosmetic sales persons, I was sitting outside a one roomed home, made with corrugated iron sheets, drinking smoky milk tea from a pot on the open fire, with 4 generations of women from one family, the eldest 100 years old, the youngest 2 years. The great grandmother was given her food by her grand- daughter. She was sitting on her goat skin leaning against her hut wall eating her lunch from a bowl with a spoon. The food had been provided by her last surviving child of 12, her youngest daughter in her 60s now living with her mother, having moved from the local ‘town’, some 8 kilometres away on a deeply pitted dirt road. The ugali and goat meat with vegetables had been made into a stew on an open fire. She spooned out all the liquid on to the earth in front of her because she wanted it dry. Her daughter and grand- daughter looked on while she did this, ensuring that the food did not tip out. When we had arrived in the sort of SUV which is ubiquitous in ‘developing’ world contexts with her grand- daughter and two great grand-daughters, she had come out to greet them but immediately went back inside the hut and come out again carrying all her belongings in a cloth bundle, secured on her head and back, which was almost her size, and her long stick. She was intent on getting back to the town to visit her grand-daughter. She was persuaded gently to put the bundle down and to have her food and to share tea and talk. She was not going to be able to go back with us. She and her widowed daughter had moved here because a grandson had taken responsibility for them. Sons are important. They provide this economic protection although widowed women are socially powerful within families. We debated how we would leave when the time came. The answer was for the men in the party to drive off in the vehicle and wait further off and for the women to stay behind. Then at a moment when we hoped she was distracted we ran towards the vehicle. She was not fooled and proceeded to follow us with remarkable swiftness for her age. We clambered in and left her with her daughter to return to their home.

We were there because my Kenyan research student had studied the interaction between gender and ethnicity in matters relating to land in 3 different communities in Kenya. The grand daughter was the sister of her interpreter for the Maasai field work. Agnes had spent time much time and many experiences with this group of women who in Maasai terms are a wealthy and influential family, owning much land. She was paying a visit to reminisce and to catch up on events. I was sharing this visit as her teacher. I also had a ‘husband’ my male partner with me. Agnes had her husband and we had two male drivers, one for the Maasai area, an influential young man who had assisted Agnes with her fieldwork in this area, and a driver whom Agnes had used generally for all her fieldwork who drove for her family. Undertaking fieldwork in rural Kenya is not easy. It involves many challenges which I was only now learning about as we met up with those who had been involved. Everyone was enjoying the stories. The interpreter’s sister, who set up many of the interviews, had been 8 months pregnant at one stage. Her mother made it clear that Agnes must be prepared to attend the birth if this should occur on one trip which involved very bumpy terrain. On one occasion the interpreter had had to climb a tree to try to get a mobile signal to enable someone to come and tow the vehicle out of the ditch. The Maasai driver had been able to clear the road of a large herd of goats while the Kisii driver had not. When the great grand- mother had been interviewed she had wanted Agnes to write down her entitlement to land on a piece of paper. She still had this piece of paper.

I am deeply uneasy about the potential voyeurism involved in this type of narrative but it was not that sort of day. The men in the party wandered off somewhere and the women chatted to each other lined up along the hut wall for a number of hours. They spoke Swahili and the Maasai language and English when necessary. I was made to feel completely welcome but not special. I shared photos from my newly bought flash smart phone of my two small grandchildren. They were struck by their very blue eyes.

A few days before I had delivered a public lecture entitled ‘caring about care; recognising and regulating body work in a global market’ at the British Institute in Eastern Africa. It was based upon my book Gender, Law and Justice in a Global Market (CUP 2011). As part of the presentation I had shown some photos of the elderly in institutional settings in the UK: older women lined up against walls in wheel chairs, heads down. I had shown pictures of migrant care workers tending to these elderly frail people. In the discussion which followed the presentation, we had had a very interesting discussion of the tensions and dilemmas that urban middle class/professional women face in coping with paid work and caring responsibilities in urban Nairobi where use of paid assistance in the home – domestic workers, nannies, care workers generally –are the norm. We discussed the consequences of privatising social responsibilities with no welfare state safety net – individual women feel responsible for the lot of other women who have left children and other family members behind to undertake these roles. The women are not paid enough to replace their care and they may be far from their own homes in the informal settlements in Nairobi. The Kenyan state has provided some legal protections and minimum wage requirements. But how are these to be met by individual women with no support from the state? Women are pitted against each other.

I looked after my mother and father in our home for the last two years of their lives. My mum was by then very frail and needed constant care. They both died aged over 90 in our home. I recognised the care that the women around me were giving on Saturday. I recognised its quality. I recognised the power relationships, the negotiations, the vulnerabilities, the love. I saw the dignity and worth of this very elderly woman’s life – her clean clothes, her neat hair, her alertness, her sense of being part of this community, her frustration at not being able to out run us to the vehicle.

There are 2.8 million people aged 50 and over providing unpaid care in the UK, including 5% of people aged 85 and over.

A quarter of all carers aged 75 and over provide 50 or more hours of informal care each week.

Carers save the UK economy an estimated £87 billion a year.

At Age UK we hear from many people in later life who are caring for a spouse, partner, relative or friend. Although many find caring rewarding and an expression of their relationship, carers also tell us that they feel invisible and undervalued. Many are stressed and exhausted. Here is an excerpt from one of those personal stories.

Jenny and James

“James and myself were both looking forward to spending our retirement together, but four months after I retired, James became ill and was diagnosed with memory loss caused by depression. Five months later he became ill again, almost overnight, and was hospitalised. He was 71.

“Eventually I was told, because James had Lewy Body dementia, I’d never be able to look after him and that he had to go into residential care. With a nursing background, I thought I could care for James at our home and believed this would be better for his mental wellbeing, but no one listened.

“Once a social worker was assigned to our case, he said he would try and enable a care package where James could live at home with me. However once our financial assessment was done, and we weren’t eligible for funding support, we were left to get on with things ourselves. I set about arranging a care package, but it was a complicated task to do with no guidance. Luckily, I’m able to use the internet, but I dread to think how I would have sorted anything without it.

“After nearly three months in hospital, James finally came home in Feb 2011.

“Being a carer is exhausting – from the moment James wakes up he needs help with everything from moving and getting dressed to washing and going to the toilet. When I don’t have night cover I’m up about four times a night and can’t sleep during the day as James needs someone with him all the time. Because we hired support workers independently we have the same ones nearly every time. I think that’s really beneficial to James, as changing faces can be particularly disorientating for someone with dementia and they perform very personal tasks.

“I take James to a day centre twice a week and this is welcome relief for me. Unfortunately we’ve just been informed that because of local authority funding cuts the centre will close next year. There are about 20 of us who use the centre, and James really enjoys his time there.

“Every six weeks I also put James in respite care for a week, to give me a complete break. Unfortunately on his most recent trip when I went to collect him he had no shoes on, his glasses were missing and he was wearing someone else’s clothes. I could tell he was frightened and he had bruises on his body. When I got him home I discovered he’d lost 8lbs in seven days. I’ve made a formal complaint and am waiting to discover the outcome, but things like that shouldn’t be acceptable and obviously I haven’t felt like I could put him in that respite home since.

“I feel I have managed to come to terms with my feelings of loss and bereavement concerning James, which were overwhelming at the start, and I just have to get on with things. I try not to think about the future. James is getting weaker, and I’m getting older so I don’t know how long I’ll be able to manage and I don’t know what will happen when our money runs out.”

Age UK Is calling for more support for older carers – from government, local authorities and health professionals – such as a Carer’s Allowance for pensioners, a choice of appropriate services and regular carers’ health checks. You can find out more about our work to highlight the support older carers need, as well as the recognition they richly deserve, on Age UK’s website.

Antony Smith is Development Officer for Equalities and Human Rights at Age UK Antony.Smith@ageuk.org.uk

A central feature of care in the fourth age is the medicalisation of ageing bodies, the emphasis on collective bodily care and the power dynamics involved in that care1. An aspect of these dynamics that has not yet been explored is the intersection of age, gender and sexuality in the provision of personal care in residential settings for older people. Single, childless, older women are most likely to populate these settings2. These women are also more likely to be lesbians, both because older lesbians and gay men are earlier and disproportionate users of formal social care, and because older lesbians are more likely than older heterosexual women to be single and childless3. Lesbians have often found the processes of self-disclosure in health contexts a treacherous terrain to navigate in earlier life, many avoiding screening/treatment and/or choosing not to disclose their sexual identities to medical professionals, particularly during intimate physical examinations4. Some younger(er) lesbians also report feeling vulnerable to the heteronormative gaze in those gay commercial contexts frequented by heterosexual women5.

Residential care for older people – heteronormative at best, homophobic at worst6, is situated at the intersection between these two sites of vulnerability. It is also a site of social exclusion where ageing bodies are hidden away and where dependency can mean it is less likely someone will complain about their care or otherwise assert their rights, especially people from minority communities7.

Care spaces in the home or in sheltered accommodation or residential care have long been recognised as complicating the notion of the public-private divide, being both public work spaces and private home spaces. For an older lesbian this becomes even more complicated. Home care which goes public no longer affords the sanctuary of private identity performance and management. Yet at the same time, because it is home care, often in care spaces where the very old older person is hidden away from the public eye, some of the legal protections which she might have been able to mobilise for herself also do not apply, when the disciplinary norms of social relationships dominate. In this way an older lesbian can be disadvantaged in multiple ways by a home that has gone public and a public space that operates on private, heteronormative, lines.

With my colleague Andrew King (University of Surrey), I’m starting work on a paper which aims to explore informal care practices within the lives of older lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people. This will problematize the framing of ‘informal care’ within policy that most often assumes that these forms of care take place either within assumed heteronormative familial relationships and/or within a dyadic relationship, with one person the ‘carer’ and one the ‘cared for’. We are drawing on ‘case stories’ which we’ve developed from our research with older LGB respondents, selected to represent wider issues within LGB communities and illustrative of a range of care practices, including care provided by friends and strangers, reciprocal care and other expressions of care within LGB communities. We anticipate our paper will also contribute to wider debates about the increasingly diverse range of family forms and social relationships that are not easy to name or recognize.

In developing this paper, we are also searching for our theoretical framework within which to situate this; the thoughts on this below are my own, although it will be something that I work on in collaboration and further feedback from members of the networks are welcome.

I’m leaning towards defining and exploring ‘care practices’ – akin to Morgan’s (1999, 2011) concept of family practices – as a way to investigate and interrogate care and caring relationship and practices and in particular, unpack the meanings of such practices – emotional, relational, moral, and symbolic. The concept of family practices seeks to shifts the focus towards what families do rather than a focus on family structures; but nevertheless also recognising that at everyday levels the ‘family’ is still a term used by individuals to describe their most meaningful relationships. Morgan suggests that this perspective offers the possibility to see the family as ‘less of a noun and more of an adjective or, possibly, a verb’ (1999:16).

Care practices could encompass a whole range of practices that bind people together, that may include conflicts, tensions and ambivalence as well as affection and love. Thus addressing some of the complexities of care – interdependence, reciprocity, conflicts (workings of power/imbalance), resources, identities, moral deliberations, emotions, labour, working across time and space, involving networks as well as individuals and dyadic relationships.

There are of course other ways of theorising care, including carescapes and an ethics of care framework. Carescapes (Mckie et al 2002) seeks to add a dimension to thinking about care across time and space – the concept developed out of concerns focused on the changing yet gendered nature of caring for children and time-space relations implicit in combining caring and working and shifting roles as children grow (but that may have wider application to other relationships of care):

Mapping routes through the shifting and changing multi-dimensional terrain that comprises their vision of caring possibilities and obligations: routes that are influenced by everyday scheduling and by combining caring work through paid work and the paid work of carers (McKie et al 2002: 904)

And of course, an ethics of care framework has been developed and drawn upon to theorise values of care (key references include Tronto, 1993 and more recently Barnes, 2012) – involving both thought and action and placing value on notions of responsibilities of providing good care; valuing connectedness, incorporating values of dignity and respect. It seems to suggest and encompass a moral framework – though not prescriptive – about the delivery of care and how it is delivered. Is that distinct from or similar to the meanings ascribed to relationships through the doing of care?

I’m left with questions that I don’t yet have answers to. Are there overlaps between the three – care practices, carescapes and ethics of care? Is it that they have developed within different spheres and that they do say the same things in different ways or do they offer distinct contributions to debates on care? All thoughts and ideas most welcome in taking these reflections forward.

The Children and Families Bill 2013 has just had its second reading in the House of Lords. One of the aims is to encourage fathers involvement in childcare and accordingly, fifty weeks of the twelve months maternity leave is to become available as parental leave to eligible parents (see the Bill 032 2013-14 as bought from the Commons, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/lbill/2013-2014/0032/14032.pdf, s89(1)). Increasing flexibility for parents may seem positive, but it is unlikely to result in a huge increase in fathers’ involvement in childcare. Indeed, it has been predicted that only 2% of eligible fathers will use any of the parental leave (http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmpublic/childrenandfamilies/130307/pm/130307s01.htm, column 137).

With such small predicted uptake, it is questionable if the Bill could approach the reconciliation of work and care differently to better encourage fathers’ participation in childcare. The legislation currently considers care as something that needs to be accommodated in the workplace only occasionally, mainly during pregnancy and childbirth, and then fleetingly throughout the rest of childhood. However, these are obviously not the only times when people will need to combine paid work and their caring responsibilities. As has often been noted in the care literature, caring is an everyday and universal occurrence (see for example, M. Fineman The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency (The New Press, 2004)). Acknowledging this may allow and encourage fathers and others to become more involved in providing care. Therefore, an overarching change to the regulation of employment which would better accommodate caring responsibilities may have been more beneficial for fathers and all carers.

Recognising the universal nature of care may ensure that its importance is acknowledged. Generally, paid work is seen as the priority and any caring responsibilities are considered obstacles to this. Indeed, although much work has been done in regards to the reconciliation of paid work and caring responsibilities, most of it comes from an employment centric vantage. If the workplace is to better accommodate carers, the importance of care must be recognised. Caring can no longer be seen as an obstacle to employment, but as an everyday occurrence that will inevitably affect the workforce. Nicole Busby’s A Right to Care? Unpaid Care Work in European Employment Law (Oxford University Press, 2011) has been a vital contribution in this regard. She advocates a right to provide care alongside paid employment. Accordingly, rather than begrudgingly accommodating care when it cannot be avoided, it would be recognised as vitally important work which will regularly impact upon all people’s lives.

Better accommodating care and acknowledging its impact upon paid work may encourage more men, including fathers to increase their involvement in care. If caring is rightly acknowledged as an unavoidable part of normal life, the penalties associated with taking time out of employment will have to be removed. Accordingly, all people would feel more able to take leave from paid work. After all, leave will only be helpful if people feel that they can actually use it (S. Eaton ‘If You Can Use Them: Flexibility Policies, Organizational Commitment, and Perceived Performance’ (2003) 42 Industrial Relations 145). Therefore, a re-evaluation of paid work and the workforce is vital. If labour law is to better accommodate carers and challenge gender stereotypes regarding care, rather than introducing more sound-bite legislation, the acknowledgement of the importance and universality of care must fundamentally change the nature of paid work.

OXPIP is one of the organisations pioneering parent-infant psychotherapy. Founded in 1998 we have been working in Oxfordshire to provide support to parents who are struggling to form a secure attachment to their baby. In the last three years we have worked with over 900 families and consistently improved mental health and the quality of the parent-infant relationship[1]. We work with babies up to the age of two and their parents, normally the mother but we have worked with many fathers as well.

Parent-infant psychotherapy is distinguished by the attention it brings to the mother’s mental health, the baby’s mental health and, crucially, to the quality of the relationship between parent and baby. This focus on the quality of the care that comes from this early experience is critical to our success in addressing intergenerational cycles of disadvantage. We all have a tendency to default to parenting our children as we were parented, even if those relationships were withdrawn, unpredictable or harmful.

Our clinicians are skilled at enabling parents to build and sustain closer relationships with their children. One of the therapeutic tools for achieving this is through modelling thoughtful, empathic ways of relating within the therapeutic relationship. For some of the parents we work with this is the first time they have really experienced being thought about and related to in this way; it can be a powerful tool for change, opening up new possibilities for how they in turn can relate to their babies.

Our team of psychotherapists come from a range of backgrounds including Child Psychotherapy, Adult Psychotherapy and Clinical Psychology as well as including prior qualifications in Health Visiting, Nursing, Midwifery, Social Work and Teaching. All have undergone Infant Observation training, and are trained in the use of video through the (NICE approved) Video Interaction Guidance approach. This mix of backgrounds and approaches gives our work a strength and rigour that forces us to constantly challenge our own preconceptions and viewpoints.

We all instinctively know that the first few years of our life are formative. There is also considerable neuroscientific evidence that has emerged to support this. OXPIP are now at the forefront of developing an evidence base for the positive impact that parent-infant psychotherapy can have. If you want to find out more then please look at our website, get in touch or leave a comment below.

With the current media frenzy about the royal couple and their baby, I thought it timely to consider scholarship on alternatives to the nuclear family. Here’s a list to be starting off with, which hopefully others will help to grow, with their own suggestions: